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Meet the hydroxyl radical: No matter what poll you read, between 80% and 90% of us put environmental degradation at the top of our list of secret fears. Nearly everyone believes, no matter what we're told, that our food chain is poisoned, the earth is warming and the integrity of our water and air have been irretrievably compromised. We don't know how to solve it, and we don't want to talk about it. Let's shop. This is a story about regulation and innovation and the tainted love that exists between the two. It's also a story about how enviro- business really can save the world. And for some extraordinary reason, this story rises out of the one corner of the North American continent that almost entirely missed the '90s boom: British Columbia. The Ballard fuel cell and the ozone scrubbers invented by Juergen Puetter and his team at Hydroxyl systems, followed to their natural conclusion, can mitigate many of the entrenched problems, seemingly without solution, that besiege us. Meet the future. "Water," says Mr. Puetter, "is the oil of the 21st century." I know this is significant, but I am too fascinated watching my meadow and the forest from an entirely new angle, that is, receding beneath my feet. No one has picked me up at my house in a helicopter before, and it is unlikely anyone will again, so the sensation is entirely new and there is rather a lot to absorb. Which pretty much describes Mr. Puetter. At 50, Mr. Puetter, the founder of Hydroxyl, is a millionaire many times over, and has been in that enviable position (on paper) since the age of 25, when his company Bionaire, in Montreal, became a success. He is an entrepreneur in the classic sense, a man with ideas and the energy, commitment and sheer bullheaded grit to make them happen. He is a free-trade, low-tax, fewer regulations political conservative. He is also green; aside from his family, the people he admires and to whom he pledges his help are environmental activists. Vicki Husband, conservation chairwoman of the Sierra Club, is a woman he mentions often and with great admiration. The affection is returned. "Juergen has faced the problem of waste, which no one wants to talk about, and he's figured out how to solve it." "I won't do this forever," Mr. Puetter says into the speakers on my headset. "At some point the entrepreneur has to step out of the picture. He is good for starting things, getting things going, but can be a liability once the company is running. When I am finished with Hydroxyl," he says, "I am going to work in forestry. We have the only large forest in the world that does not add value to its timber. We just cut it down and export it. The rate of destruction in remote areas is astounding. One watershed after another is disappearing." Ah yes, water. If water is to the 21st century what oil was to the 20th, British Columbia will be a vast, liquid boom town. Beneath us, on this sunny Monday morning as we fly toward southern Vancouver Island, water stretches for hundreds of miles in three directions. The sea today is navy blue, by turns shadowy and lit by sunlight, utterly calm. Underneath us, islands, tiny and large, are dressed entirely from beach to rock face in feathery evergreen. On the islands, and the mainland, B.C. is pockmarked by tiny, glittering lakes, torn by great rivers. Seemingly pristine, clean, utterly pure. Bear with me a moment while I recite some statistics. Beluga whales in the St. Lawrence estuary have been found with such high levels of toxins in their blubber that, under Canadian law, they qualify as hazardous waste. Fish in the north Pacific and North Sea have been found with levels of toxic chemicals so high as to be linked with immune system depression. Male flounders in the North Sea are undergoing feminization as a result of exposure to endocrine disrupters. A new book to be published this year claims that, worldwide, our oceans are rapidly dying from overfishing, which damages the food cycle, and from the effluent, toxic chemicals, runoffs and sewage the world pumps, with seeming impunity, into the ocean. Most think this is irreversible. The first global survey of groundwater pollution, released last year, shows that a toxic brew of chemicals is fouling groundwater everywhere. In California, 100,000 gasoline tanks leach MtBE, the carcinogen popularized by Julia Roberts and Erin Brockovich, into the groundwater. Today, there are as many as 100,000 synthetic chemicals in commercial production and new synthetics are entering the market at an average of three per day. Most of these compounds are persistent organic pollutants (POPs), synthetic poisons that are extremely stable and accumulate in living things. Sixty per cent of the most hazardous liquid waste in the United States -- 34 billion litres per year of solvents, heavy metals and radioactive materials - - is injected directly into deep groundwater via thousands of injection wells. Even though the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency requires that such effluents be injected below the deepest source of drinking water, some have entered water supplies in Florida, Texas, Ohio and Oklahoma. "Groundwater contamination is an irreversible act that will deprive future generations of one of life's basic resources," says Payal Sampat, author of Deep Trouble: The Hidden Threat of Groundwater Pollution. I ask Mr. Puetter if this is true. "No, it is not," he shakes his head emphatically. "The technology to clean it is there, and it's cheap. We just lack the political will." Meet the hydroxyl radical. The PacMan of Earth's atmosphere, brought to life by solar radiation, this molecule of hydrogen and oxygen spends the second or so before it flickers out of existence gobbling up anything that fouls the air: carbon monoxide, sulfurous gases, unburned oil. Combined with oxygen and ozone, in Mr. Puetter's process, hydroxyl can turn nuclear waste streams into pure water. It can scrub groundwater clean of MtBE, a seemingly impossible task, which Mr. Puetter completed successfully last year for American Airlines. It can accept all the waste streams our modern, greed-fixated consumerist society can create and turn them back into rainwater and fertilizer. But there is a glitch. The hydroxyl radical increases in the presence of greenhouse gases. Regulate those emissions and the hydroxyl radical, Earth's recycling agent, declines. For a nice paradox, look at the cruise-ship industry -- the polluter at its most intense consumerist frenzy. The average cruise ship dumps 300,000 gallons of grey and black water, teeming with nearly every poison man has invented, into the ocean every single day. On Sept. 14 last year, Tony Knowles, the Governor of Alaska, announced that no longer would the vast cruise-ship industry be allowed to dump its effluents in Alaskan waters. Carnival, Norwegian, Royal Caribbean and Princess immediately beat a path to Sidney, B.C., to negotiate with Hydroxyl. Princess issued a $100,000 check to Mr. Puetter, just so they could claim they were the first to negotiate a letter of agreement. Mr. Puetter spent last weekend installing the first of his treatment plants on the first Norwegian ship, while the ship was cruising to the Cayman Islands. Within the next six months, he could install his equipment on all four lines, or 95% of the cruise-ship industry. Government action at its most effective. Former B.C. environment minister Moe Sihota, faced with the breakdown of sewage treatment in Duncan, B.C., in the mid-'90s, decided to take a flyer on Hydroxyl and installed Mr. Puetter's system. This year BC Ferries installed Hydroxyl's equipment on two of its ferries and plans to kit out 16 more over the next five years. That one decision opened the door to the marine application. Again, good government. The Alaska Marine Highway, the enormous fleet of ferries run by the state, announced two weeks ago it had looked at all the other methods of cleaning up its marine waste and decided Hydroxyl not only produced the best results, but was also the cheapest. The next steps are the Coast Guard and the military. If B.C. and Alaska can get together on the cruise-ship industry and all publicly owned ships travelling in Cascadia's coastal waters, why not borough septic commissioners in every municipality in Canada? Why not pig farmers in Alberta and Ontario? The chopper touches down at Langford, the treatment plant for southern Vancouver Island, which was installed by Mr. Puetter 18 months ago. In a tin warehouse two-thirds the size of a football field, three men watch over a fully automated process that transforms the sewage of 400,000 people into fertilizer and rainwater. And guess what, it doesn't smell. "The municipality made us sign an agreement that said if any of the residents around here complained about the stink, we would issue a $1,000 check for every day that the smell remained." He grins, triumphant. "It hasn't happened." One of B.C.'s most prominent businessmen, who has run companies in the public sector, says, "Juergen has immense entrepreneurial skill, but he is a scientist, too. He's hired leaders in specific areas of treatment and waste mediation and developed way ahead of others technologies that are not only effective, but economical. The magic is that they will pay for themselves through the savings generated by the companies who buy them." Everyone loves Juergen, the right, the left, greens and the board members of the cruellest of multi-nationals. Despite the glamour of the marine business, and the undoubted good he can do with industrial waste, what energizes Mr. Puetter most is individual septic systems, and municipal sewage. He is slated to replace the failed municipal sewage treatment plant in a large B.C. industrial town that was installed only two or three years ago. The plant can be financed on the savings in operating costs alone that rise from Hydroxyl's technology. For years, Mr. Puetter has been trying to get the attention of the city of Victoria, which dumps most of its untreated sewage straight into the ocean, as does Halifax and St. John's. "Regulating the environment is practically impossible and presents the single largest impediment to progress," Mr. Puetter says in his office at the edge of the Victoria airport. Tucked inside one of his steel sheds is a Grumman Goose, a vintage propeller plane he uses to fly his wife and son into the deepest untouched parts of British Columbia. "The market wants us, but we're so bogged down in regulation. This city represents the first large- scale demonstration of what we can do with municipal waste streams." One small, inexpensive Hydroxyl installation, and the Walkerton problem wouldn't have happened. Another could eradicate Victoria's problem. "Bureaucrats cannot make scientific decisions, it makes no sense. Liability is an enormous concern in government. No one is willing to take the responsibility for change. Every district has an individual health inspector, and all have a fiefdom to protect. "What government can do," he continues, "is announce that standards must be kept. We are an expense for most companies. They would not use us if they did not have to use us. But there is no one rule to solve any problem, and any attempt by government to involve itself in the process turns almost immediately into corruption. "Technology is not the problem," he repeats. "The technology is there. We do not have the political will."

© 2004 Elizabeth Nickson The material at this website is available only for personal non-commercial purposes, and it may not be reproduced without permission.